Disabling systemd in Debian 8
The change to systemd in Debian Jessie has led to some irritating default
behaviour (such as tty2 to tty6 no longer being accessible using the
Alt-F2 to Alt-F6 key commands at one point in the run up to Jessie release).
To revert to sysvinit-style boot:
apt-get install sysvinit-core
cp /usr/share/sysvinit/inittab /etc/inittab
Reboot, then remove systemd:
apt-get remove --purge --autoremove systemd
This restores sysvinit-style boot. It may also introduce a 30-second hang while
udev does its stuff. To get rid of the hang, edit the file
/etc/udev/udev.conf
The line #udev_log="info"
needs to be uncommented and changed to: udev_log="err"
It will be necessary to build a new initrd.img after modifying udev.conf, eg:
mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-3.16-3-amd64 3.16-3-amd64
After this the system should boot properly. Alt-F7 no longer switches into X
as in earlier versions of Debian, but Alt-Fx (where x is the number of the
tty from which startx was launched) does.
To make sure systemd doesn't get re-installed in future updates, apt-pinning
can be used. Create the file: /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd
which needs to contain the following lines:
Package: systemd
Pin: release
Pin-Priority: -1
Note that upgrades to some packages which had nothing to do with init in
previous Debian versions may still cause mkinitramfs to generate a new
initrd.img after systemd has been disabled. The system will still contain
the libsystemd0 package, but this is for compatibility only and is not part
of systemd itself.